The avocado meme started in Australia, where avocados are expensive due to their water requirements, and where there’s been a housing crisis for at least twenty years.
It wasn’t the cost of avocados as a raw ingredient.
An opinion columnist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘newspapers’ blamed the decline in home ownership amongst millennials on excessive spending on discretionary food, specifically avocado on toast in cafes.
He suggested that if they cut back on such minor luxuries, they could afford to buy houses.
The United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK all have housing and affordability problems, out of the five I can understand the UK but the other four countries I absolutely do not…
What do they all have in common English similar economies and relatively similar governments.
In Australia the root cause is likely policy that rewards rather than penalises multiple home ownership as investment, leading to flow on effects that raise prices and doesn't boost building.
However not all would agree with that and each stake holding group has a different take on things.
eg: The Australian home builders industry group, the HIA, throw shade on increased costs and government fees and push back on other hot takes here:
I lived through my peers struggling to get a single house built or rennovated in early 80's and later and watched finnancial incentives made it easier and easier to get a second, a third, a fourth house just as happens in Monopoly
Hand in hand with that, those people with houses as assets could afford to bid higher against each other for that fifth house .. pushing out those younger and just entering the scene.
It's hard to discount the rapid rise of a landlord class as being a significant factor.